


The Turning Point

by Capricorn_Stellium



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Anxiety, Depression, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Post-Cybertronian Civil War, Post-War, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:41:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,822
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27078997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Capricorn_Stellium/pseuds/Capricorn_Stellium
Summary: Prowl reflects on his role in a post-war Cybertronian society, and for the first time, feels guilt over some of his past actions.As he struggles to enter recharge, he sifts through his memory core, trying to identify the moment he had changed.
Comments: 6
Kudos: 21





	The Turning Point

**Author's Note:**

> My father is a war veteran, and some of Prowl’s thoughts in the beginning are reflective of some of what my family has gone through in the process of going from a state of being in military service to a state of civilian life. I tried to keep it from getting too overbearingly real, but themes of psychological trauma are inevitably present throughout this fic. 
> 
> If that is potentially triggering, especially as depression and anxiety are clear themes throughout this fic, please be careful or do not read, whichever may be best for your individual mental health and wellbeing. 
> 
> Other mental health issues/symptoms are also discussed, such as dissociation. There are also some descriptions of violence and physical illness. Please proceed with caution or do not read if that kind of content may be difficult or upsetting for you. 
> 
> There is also a fair amount of fictional in-universe political discussion; Inevitably, this relates to Prowl's police work. If this is a difficult or traumatising story element in light of current events or perhaps any personal experiences you may have had with police or similar authorities, I ask that you proceed carefully or please check out if it is too much to deal with even in a fictional context.

Sometimes, recharging was impossible. 

He laid flat on his berth, wishing his processor could just enter sleep mode for once without feeling the need to review every single item in the back of his memory core before doing so. 

But it seemed that adjusting to a post-war life was far more difficult than he had ever imagined it would be; It wasn’t the larger changes that bothered him, but the small things. 

Establishing new routines had always been hard for him as a mech well invested in as much of a schedule as he could manage, if only for the sake of trying to stabilise himself amidst constant chaos and endless interruptions regardless of any plans. He was used to that chaos, the noise and constant rush, the strain and panic… And without it, he felt so light, that he might waft away. 

Sometimes he felt so light, he couldn’t seem to remain connected to his own frame. He didn’t feel real, or the world around him didn’t feel real, whichever it was. Maybe both. His processor seemed to almost disconnect, his sensory net numbed, it was bizarre. It scared him, but whenever it happened, he was unable to react. In a zoned out state, he just waited it out, like an intense daydream or one of those out-of-body experiences the Spectralists always talked about. 

Prowl had recently started to experience what Rung had told him were dissociative episodes. He was just glad it wasn’t some kind of processor damage or something, although really, it was, wasn’t it? Nobody escaped war in one piece. 

He kept it quiet; Rung was a professional and would hardly go behind his back on their confidentiality agreement, the same he held for all his clients, despite the bitter voice in his helm telling him that nobody could be fully trusted. If word got out that he was having processor problems, how long until Ratchet was after him? How long until he was deemed unfit for duty? 

There were other bots, newer and younger bots, developing an entirely new police force on Cybertron as there was so little of the old guard left alive and the old way of doing things would hardly suffice in this post-war civilisation. Prowl couldn’t be replaced yet, but it was inevitable that one day he’d likely be phased out, maybe not fired or decommissioned, but left behind as an artefact from a broken world that gave way to a renewed one with a brighter future than inevitable destruction.

Which he would have been fine with, had his job not been the only thing keeping him going. He didn’t want to hasten the process along, and if some of the things he’d done recently hadn’t gotten him thrown out, not permanently anyway, he doubted there was much that could. 

Still. He already didn’t know how to adjust; Could he ever adjust to being anything else, other than him? Prowl had been raised under Functionist rule, and although he strongly disagreed with their philosophies, some element of Functionism had wormed its way into his processor for good, regardless of its condition. He struggled to separate his personal identity from what had been his given purpose, his job. 

With the war over and the new political system settling in and things becoming gradually more real to everyone, it was finally done, they could all finally move on… Move on to what? What was there to do now, compared to all the weight they had carried for so long? Nothing felt important in the wake of how crucial every small action had been during the conflict. 

It left an odd quiet in his day to day life. There was no more of the unknowing and tension that had permeated the past four centuries. He felt numb, and had been making more and more reckless decisions. He had been for a while, first out of desperation to end the war, then out of a drive to clean up all the loose ends, then out of a sense of duty to help aid the redevelopment of Cybertron and the restoration of their people… 

Where does anyone go, once all goals have been met, regardless of how it was all achieved? 

His hab suite was terribly quiet, something he had yearned for during the war but now could hardly stand after centuries of loud, close quarters, shared barracks, space limitations on various ships and outposts. He supposed his thoughts had to be loud in order to fill the dead air.

Prowl liked his job. He still liked it, and he had liked it from the beginning. At least, he thought so.

The work had often kept him distracted from his life, which he was fine with. 

But he hadn’t had the time or energy to think about it in a long, long time… Perhaps these would be the memories to send him off to recharge. 

Leaning his helm back and shutting off his optics once more, he began to sink into his memories. 

—

Cold-constructed, he had always been made to feel like he was less than so many of those around him, forged and proud of it, blessed by Primus, created as intended. Meanwhile, he was manufactured, a product of the Silver Harvest, at best a product of one of Nova Prime’s science projects born of wartime scarcity and at worst a theological existentialist crisis with an artificial spark cased in a mass produced body. 

He remembered how harsh it had been, back when people still cared about that kind of thing. It might be long in the past now, with everyone currently just trying to find stability and make a new Cybertronian culture that was more liveable, more welcoming, perhaps less prone to outbreaks of violent planetary conflict. Although of course, old biases continued to survive in the sparks of those who had survived the war, those who were old enough to recall the petty divisions that pre-dated the Autobot-Decepticon conflict. 

He hated that he remembered thinking it was good, that all the other petty details were lost in the face of a purely two-sided crisis. Nobody cared if you were forged or cold constructed when the most pressing issue was whether you’d all be dead in the next nanoclick or not. 

But Prowl would never forget his earlier cycles in Petrex, where those kinds of cruel distinctions had taken root both socially and in formal legislation; It had been one of the more staunchly Functionist regions of Cybertron before the war, with very traditional ideas held regarding everything from the “proper” worship of Primus to the meaning of one’s alt-mode. 

He had been lucky in that his alt-mode fell right in the middle of the class system; Not large or durable enough for the hardest, most insufferable work, but not light or small enough to be assigned to processor numbing repetitive or boring indoors jobs. Not common enough to ever be at risk of being culled, but not rare enough to warrant particular notice. 

It was hard to think of what he might have become if given the chance to choose, back then. He couldn’t remember what he had personally liked or been interested in, if anything. He had always wanted to be engaged with people, he had always been curious, but those were traits, not opinions. 

Joining the force had never been entirely up to him; His alt-mode was perfect for it, and his affinity for problem solving, his determination and patience, made him ideal for police work. 

But his patience, at least, had worn thin by the end of the war. 

Back when he was new on the force, crime had been relegated to fairly petty things, with the most common cases being theft. Until he had been moved up to the more serious case work, he hardly ever saw anything worse than that. And even then, murders were still relatively rare until factional divisions had significantly ramped up shortly before the war kicked off; Nobody had wanted to draw the ire or punishment of the Functionist Council. Fear was a strong deterrent. 

During the war, though… Crime became endemic. Constant. Unavoidable. Everyone broke social codes, bent their morals, committed acts of violence that would have completely re-written the legal code on Cybertron altogether if the traditional courts had still been around by that point. 

He thought back to the first case he had ever fudged on purpose: 

A case of relatively minor theft, some energon cubes and a first-aid kit had been stolen from a supply store near the border with Esserlon. It fell just on the Petrex side of the line, and so Prowl had been sent out to resolve it. 

Despite how minor the theft had been, the owner of the store wanted the case escalated as far as it could go, making it Prowl’s call as to how they could proceed. 

He could have pushed it a little harder. The thief already had four accounts of petty theft on their record, making them a repeat offender likely to steal or commit a break-in again in the future based on commonality between incident details. A serial thief, perhaps. 

But in those days, he had been more compassionate. The war hadn’t happened yet, he had been younger, and he felt empathy for the offender; A poor bot from a far lower class, who had a small frame with paint thinning and stripping from her frame. Her left optic was cracked, which he noted as a potential sign of past assault or injury to investigate on its own later, and damage to her armour suggested her self-healing nanites weren’t functioning to their best ability, hinting at long term energon deprivation. 

As by-the-data-pad as he had been back then, he still couldn’t bring himself to make an example of such an easy case. It was clear to him that she stole only what she needed, despite much more being available in such a well-stocked store, intended for long distance travellers going between the two regions. 

He lied to the store owner; Told the mech he’d handle it, take her in to Petrex Central for processing, which seemed to appease him even though Prowl thought it had to be an obvious lie. Evidently not; The store owner signed off on the report, not noticing the fields left empty for Prowl to fill in later. 

Instead of putting her up for prosecution, Prowl had taken the terrified bot to a more local station, pulling rank a bit to access a small interrogation room. He had booked it for the privacy it would afford them.

The bot’s designation was Rheostat, and she had worked in local radio communications before she was deemed outdated by the Functionists and resigned to an early retirement. Her alt-mode was a large resistor, which granted her some opportunities to enter a couple other select fields, none of which were particularly kind or easy; A harsh change of circumstance, for such a soft-spoken bot.

She had been fired again recently after a short term serving as a sub-generator operator for a local power station; The work had proven too much of a strain for her overall smaller frame, and the electrical current had eventually overwhelmed her, resulting in some internal damage to her protoform mesh and a brief but critical loss of power to the border area. 

With nowhere to go, she had been recharging illegally in various places.

Prowl hadn’t added that to her record, either. 

It had left her exposed to any wandering the streets at night, and resulted in the injury to her optic; A mech dizzy from overconsumption of engex had been wandering around in a rage, and found her recharging in the open, resting up against a wall. The bot had kicked her head back into it; Her helm had taken the blow without major injury, but her faceplate was far more sensitive, and her optic went out instantly with some localised damage around the blow out. 

After taking a moment to reassure her that she wasn’t going to prison, Prowl called the station’s medic in to treat her, and before he left, arranged for her to take up a janitorial position at the station. They hadn’t been looking to hire; He could be persuasive when he wanted to be. 

It wasn’t a glorious position, but it kept her safe. 

Back then, that had been his goal. Solve problems, make people safe. 

When had that changed? 

He tried to relax a bit more, attempting to employ one of Rung’s mindful meditation techniques, flexing and relaxing individual parts of his body and letting his processor wander… 

Prowl couldn’t tell if he were disappointed by how quickly he had lost himself in chaos once the war started, or if he were proud of himself for immediately finding a way to adapt; It was questionable, but it had also gotten him through centuries of unrelenting crisis. At what cost, he didn’t want to consider. Right now, this wasn’t about the endings, it was about the beginnings. 

Before he made the worst mistakes. 

He determined there was no particular single case that marked the beginning of his moral decline; Rather, it had become every case. Each one chipped away at his spark, or perhaps, stained it; Every awful new discovery had only served to disillusion and isolate him more, something he’d possibly have flagged as radicalisation in a suspect but had failed to notice in himself. 

It was early in the war.

He hadn’t been in Petrex at the time, but had been familiarised with the other larger city states as his career had progressed and he ended up working his way into several major investigations. As tensions had picked up between then-undefined factional divisions and activist cell groups, there were far more questions than answers, and each step of every investigation had only led him to uncover more secrets and corruption. 

That whole period of his life was a blur in his memory, no case really sticking out to him as notably worse or better than the others. They had all been terrible. Rather, what he had felt personally during those cases was what he could recall the best. Rung had said it was a trauma response; Being able to recall the emotions or sensations of a situation, but very little if anything else other than the barest of details outside of that. 

Certainly, Rung seemed to be on to something; It was almost funny to Prowl that his psychological damage had begun before the war even kicked off. Given the nature of his job, it wasn’t surprising, but the escalation seemed to be what had hit him hardest.  
The last five cases he worked before things had truly kicked off probably did more cumulative damage to his processor than a good number of far worse things he’d dealt with during the actual war, by his own estimation. 

He recalled how at first, his shock at the sheer scale and depth of corruption that revealed itself to him the higher and higher up into the echelons of society he went began to taper after each successive case, every senator he found committing the most heinous and vile of crimes became more and more routine, normalised despite the magnitude of the violence, the nature of cruel plots and acts against Cybertronian life itself… He just wanted to be a good officer, but it was impossible to be a good officer in a system that was inherently failed, inherently ineffective, inherently bad. 

It was burn out. The shock he had felt gradually dulled into a permanent numbness, any trust he may have had in any institutions, any convictions— It all became this dead weight of purpose. He did it because he had to. Not because he was curious, not because he wanted to help people, not because of any remaining belief in any structure of law. 

That was it. Part of it, anyway. He had burnt out, completely, just before Optimus Prime came forth, declared his faction the Autobots, harkening the end of their old ways. 

Prowl had never felt all that good about the heart of the conflict, or at least, the driving ideals of either faction. It was… Complicated. 

He had spent more time dealing with those deemed criminal or low class than most of the others in the Autobot ranks; He joined up without hesitation, sure. He had been called to the arena riots after Megatron’s gladiatorial victories, had seen first hand the evolution of his followers from righteously enraged working bots seeking fair treatment to genuinely violent radicals with a toxic internal culture, deviated entirely from their original goals, more geared towards takeover, hungry for revenge and not fair reparations. 

The desire for revenge, he could understand. Prowl had seen how most of these people had lived, how the legal system was designed to destroy them and torture them for even minor infractions, or no infractions at all. He did, in his spark, agree completely with the pre-Deception era followers of Megatron. They deserved better. Their world had failed them more than it had failed anyone else. 

Especially as a mech from Petrex, home of some of the most aggressively restrictive Functionist social codes… Some of the bots mourned what they had lost in the war. On one occasion, he had personally heard Rodimus crying in his hab suite over the loss of Nyon long after the incident had occurred. 

But, Petrex? He didn’t really miss Petrex all that much. He didn’t care if it was rebuilt, or how it would be rebuilt. It wasn’t a matter of hate for the place, but just lack of attachment; The culture there never emphasised personal connections.

Perhaps that made it even easier for him to eventually do all the questionable things he had done as the war dragged on. Even a few things he’d done since the end of the war. 

The vast majority of the Autobots were middle or upper class bots. Many of them had joined up with no lived experience or understanding of what the conflict was even about, what it had all come from. They were well-intentioned, but wasn’t that the problem? Being polite and allowing the Council and Senate to degrade into a cesspool of nepotism and filthy shanix stolen from public funds being diverted illegally- by those intended to uphold the law, by some who had written the laws they were violating- into nothing but full blown campaigns against anyone that wasn’t sparked lucky. 

Prowl felt while diplomacy and law were ideals to uphold, the reality he had so painfully discovered was that diplomacy and law didn’t matter. They were good ideas, conceptually. But in practice, it had been the illusion of those two things that had barely managed to hold Cybertronian society together for so long.  
That revelation, amidst all this reflection, was probably one of the major turning points that had pushed him beyond compassion for so long.

Petrex was built on a concept of code, as flawed as it had been. Prowl himself had been raised within that rigid structure, believed in it, participated in it, and grew to work to uphold it. His life had been hard but not unbearable. He was cold constructed, and that caught him all kinds of cruelty and pettiness, but he was still undeniably middle class, and fit in to that structure well. 

And as a result, he had been as unaware as any other middle class civilian that it was all rusted, their entire society from the top down, and it had been rusting for a long time before that. 

The lower class bots knew, because their lives reflected that reality. They were raised in decay, expected to rot under the foot of the authority that discarded them, forced into lives of destitution— Centuries of existing without fuel, shelter, medical care, education, and as their framed fell apart from cumulative damage, they lost transportation options, too. 

He didn’t punish those people. It wasn’t helpful to just pity them, either. He had high aspirations; He wanted to become a lead detective, a lead police agent, to help get to the bottom of how these people had been failed, why they were being forced into lives of crime borne from desperation. Surely, the higher ups could see what was going on. So why hadn’t it been fixed? 

He found out. And it threw his understanding of all aspects of life into a permanent downward spiral, it wrecked him, because it made him doubt. 

Prior to that point of revelation, Prowl had always believed he handled cases to the best of his knowledge and ability, always in fair ways. But there was so much potential, such a high chance, that he had at least on occasion acted as an agent of the Functionists, of the Council, of the Senate, in some unintended way. 

Then he found the database. 

It was the Central Hub, the collation of police records and cases from all over Cybertron, part of the larger network of central repository data centres hosted in Iacon.

And when he had the opportunity to do a quick search, just a quick look— His records were there as well. A file on him, of course, but also every single case he’d ever handled. Copies of all of his own notes and those from other involved agents were included, and their entire histories, and secondary and tertiary data. 

Rheostat’s case had been there as well. He looked at the notes that had been added most recently. She was removed by higher authorities from the janitorial position near Esserlon, that he had been so happy he could arrange for her, that had gotten her free of the streets. And they had transported her as a repeat petty offender to the slums of Polyhex, one of several notorious “Dead End” zones. 

She ended up one of the Empties, so chronically fuel starved that their frames and protoforms begin to be cannibalised by malfunctioning nanites desperate for raw material to convert into energy. A nightmarish fate, with a slow and frightening death the only outcome. The only saving grace was that the processor tended to offline early as the nanites eat through the memory core and key wiring of those afflicted, resulting in mindless shambling soulless bots, sparks sputtering, visible through half-devoured chest plating. 

Horrified, he had looked up case after case, any cases at all that he had been involved in personally. Outcomes were ultimately similar across the board. Not a single case resulted in rehabilitation or rehoming, no offenders were given fair trials or spared agonising, verminous fates. 

Nothing he had ever done had mattered. Not really.

The system was broken. It was impossible to be a good cop when the framework was designed not to protect people, not to help people, but to enforce a never-ending stream of suffering to benefit those who lived far away from the slums and Dead Ends of Cybertron. Bots who lived in glass panelled towers in affluent neighbourhoods with personal staff and bottle after bottle of expensive engex had simply arbitrarily decided a good number of the population weren’t worth dignified lives, or dignified deaths. 

It made Prowl dizzy, even now, to remember that afternoon at the Central Hub. The rage and shock had been so much, on top of all the high ranking cases he’d suffered through trying to solve in the lead up to that moment, that it changed some pathways in his processor, he was sure. Perhaps that was it; The culmination of uncovering all the evil that had existed, then the undeniable proof that it had always been that way, it was so deeply rooted as to erase all the good he ever might have done as a living extension of the law… Laws that killed, overwhelmingly, more than anything else. 

He was cold-constructed, tailor made, for this purpose. And it was a futile one. 

Optics offline and laid flat on his berth, it still made his processor spin and his spark stutter to consider the implications. He couldn’t ever let himself feel that moment fully, not even as a memory, or it would stop his spark dead— Or warp his processor irreparably. He was sure of it. Not even Ratchet could bring him back from a break down like that. 

It never stopped hurting. It would never stop. 

Was he just fundamentally broken? He didn’t think so. He felt, in fact, inordinately resilient. He was still here. A broken world, an endless war, the reconstruction of society from the ground up. And he was still here.

But perhaps that resilience came, ultimately, at the cost of his empathy. 

After uncovering the truth at the Central Hub, he had completely walled himself off. His EM field might as well have been disengaged entirely. He threw himself more into his work, and he worked alone as often as possible. 

And when he had to have a partner, it was almost always Jazz; He liked Jazz. Prowl knew he could handle the truth. He wouldn’t put a less experienced bot anywhere near this line of work, not ever again, no matter how low their ranks dwindled. In fact, he didn’t even like Jazz being subjected to it, despite his well refined ability to cope and his high degree of professionalism. 

Experience like that was valuable on a renewed Cybertron, but exceedingly rare; Relatively few mature bots had survived the war on either side. Their population was small, but growing, to the point that already they were nearing population numbers similar to pre-war levels owing to new sparks and new returnees, plus a few curious bots from Caminus and other various colonies. 

Prowl would be needed for a while yet, if even just to help train up a new police force. 

Could he trust himself after how far he had diverted from his original goals to help write the new codes, or establish protocols? Could he ever trust anyone to do it? Could there ever be a police force that could be trusted as an institution, to function as a genuine service for good? 

He no longer knew for certain, if he ever had. He thought he did, so long ago. 

And it led to him being here, alone in a too large, too quiet hab suite, failing to recharge because his processor was somehow damaged from a lifetime of failed, broken, rusted, corrupt systems that ostensibly had, at least at first, at some point long long before Functionism, had been made for the purposes of good. To uphold a just word of law. To ensure codes were enforced for the betterment of society.

But somewhere along the line and for however long, it had been so totally diverted and warped away from that concept of purpose that instead of feeling proud of being chosen to help head the reformation of a new law enforcement institution on Cybertron, he felt fear. 

What laws would they be expected to uphold, on this revitalised Cybertron? Would they be able to effectively uphold them, or challenge them if they were morally wrong? There was no way to build an incorruptible system, or ensure every agent or officer was truly and genuinely suited for the work. Every unit fails after a long enough time, true for hardware, true for software, true for anything on Cybertron, it seemed. What measures could possibly be put in place to ensure anything so far in the future, especially with planetary politics still in the process of stabilising? 

If he helped in this endeavour, as he had been asked, would he just be complicit in creating the same eventual problems all over again? 

Would there be some young officer far in the future, staring horrified into a database somewhere, losing all sense of worth and accomplishment and spirit, worn down by so much rust? 

The Wreckers had told him about some movement that had sprung up, calling for the abolition of such institutions of authority. Prowl doubted those people would speak to a highly prolific police agent about such matters, but it interested him. He wanted, and needed, to know more.

This new Cybertronian civilisation was supposed to be better than the last. People were supposed to work together now, move forward, and innovate anew to patch where old systems had led to the suffering that in turn had led to devastation and conflict.

He wanted so desperately to believe it was possible, even though everything else he believed in had always fallen apart. 

Never again. That was the idea of all this, right? 

Prowl had an idea. 

For the first time in countless cycles, he smiled to himself in the dark, satisfied enough to slip into recharge while formulating a plan. 

Before his sensory net entered sleep mode, somewhere very deep in the core of his spark, he felt something reignite.


End file.
